The New Web Measurement: Attention

I loved hearing this. Nielsen/NetRatings are moving to use total time spent by users of a site as its primary measurement. A lot of forward thinking companies are fniding ways to hold someone's attention for a certain period of time - there is no correlation between that and how many new pages they look at. What about AJAX ? See how you can move things around on iGoogle personalized pages ? This is a very cool method of transmitting and receiving small bits of information without loading a new page. The old page view system would only measure that as one page. So even if someone was watching a video on a page or playing a game within a page, up until now, it was counted as one page.

We have moved from hits to pages to attention.

So, we are now going to move to an attention era. There will be winners and losers. My belief is that companies that have bulging page views due to their free mail services - such as Yahoo and MSN - will be hit the most. Big winners will be online game companies and video sites.

Check out the article here: New Web metric likely to hurt Google, help YouTube